What we love…

Bluebee Pals app is a fun educational app which encourages kids to practice daily routines, using words to narrate what they are doing, sight words and play

Summary

Overall, the Bluebee Pals app is a fantastic app which encourages kids to learn as well as have fun. I love seeing all the different ways that my kids interact with the app and try the various activities. The app is gender neutral and allows you to pick your favorite Bluebee Pal to play along OR choose your own Bluebee Pal.

Our Rating

Bluebee Pals App

Bluebee Pals app by Kayle Concepts LLC is a universal app for iOS and Android. As many of you know, I have been part of The iMums for a really long time! I’m pleased to note, that I had a chance to help design this app. The app brings BlueBee Pals to life using an app which teaches life skills such as; bathing, tooth brushing, washing hands, bedtime routines, as well as a kitchen which encourages your child to feed Bluebee a variety of meals and snacks. The app uses scaffolded learning, the first mini game is generally easier and for younger children – if you tap the arrow at the bottom you are given a more complex game for example, lining up your ABC’s turns into sight words. In the ice cream mini game, first you find the Bluebee Pals and then you have to match them to the appropriate beach chairs. You can learn more about the app on the Bluebee Pals website.

Upon opening the app, you are able to select your favorite Bluebee Pal – or one that you already have. Then you can view an instructional video where you learn more about Bluebee Pals and how to connect them. From there you can enter your child’s name – and while there touch each of the Bluebees to have them say their name and wave! Choose your favorite color balloon, and a favorite activity. A screen is presented with a variety of things you can do with your Bluebee Pals – did you know that Bluebee works with any Bluetooth enabled device ranging from a smartphone, laptop, smart TV, to a tablet? After that you are brought to the hub of the app where you choose a room for your daily activity – which I will highlight below.

The app features narration and a variety of fun games as well. Below I will highlight each – these can be accessed either from the house hub or via the Bluebee Pals library.

Kitchen – Enter and exit the kitchen to try a variety of meal options including: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Be sure to enter and exit the kitchen multiple times so you can see each of the meal options. The recycle bin lets you recycle items as well! There are cups, plates, food and even a cake to put on the table.

Living Room – Enter the living room and tap on the various objects including the couch, iPad and laptop to hear their name

Bedroom – Enter the bedroom and see how Bluebee cleans his room and puts his sneakers away! He also uses an animated guitar, shoe typing sequence and then a bedtime routine. In this room you can also put Bluebee to bed, change the covers and then turn off the light. After the Bluebee goes to sleep, you can go back to his bedroom and tap on the objects in the room.

Bathroom – Enter the bathroom and give your Bluebee a shower. Turn on the water and then tap the sponge to wash Bluebee’s fur. After getting out of the tub Bluebee needs to be dried with a bathtowel or blow drier. Then, brush the fur so it’s soft and clean. After bathtime, it’s time to brush teeth – kids move around the toothbrush to clean their teeth. After 20 seconds, teeth are clean and it’s time to practice washing hands. Then kids can tap on the items in the bathroom to hear their names.

Playroom – This room has learning and fun! Kids can practice their ABC’s and sight words, drag Bluebee through the maze, find a Bluebee on the island and match them to chairs, move cars and trucks around the track and hear their horns. Other mini games include a six piece puzzle, voice recorder so kids can record their voice — or parents can record their voice and have the app say it back. There is also a robot game where you assemble robots, dress up and match fruits to the right color balloon.

Bluebee Pals Library – Using this library you can select a mini game for the playroom.

Bluebee Resource Section – this parental gated area requires a four digit date of birth where you can access resources including: voice recorder, activities along with app reviews, a letter from founder Laura Jiencke about Bluebee Pals. This parental gated area does contain external links.

My son loves this app – one of his favorite mini games is the cars and trucks around the track. He loves placing all the cars on the track at the same time and seeing them zoom around. As a parent, I love that the app has both an educational and fun component to it. My son will practice zooming cars, learning letters, practicing the names of foods and more! I really liked that we can show a bath routine sequence, and then follow through in real life. I also loved using the app with our Bluebee Pal Parker who speaks the narration and moves his head in time to the app. My son also loved reading with Bluebee – for a full list of items that you can try with Bluebee – look in the resource section accessed from the main hub of the house or try this link. The app contains a parental gated area with resources and external links. I find that my son is repeating words that he learned in the app – especially in the kitchen and I’ve even gotten him to ask for a few foods like banana as a result of seeing them in the app. Above, I have highlighted each of the individual areas and items within the app – my kids have spent hours discovering each section as well as practicing letters, puzzles, creative thinking to solve problems and more.

Overall, the Bluebee Pals app is a fantastic app which encourages kids to learn as well as have fun. I love seeing all the different ways that my kids interact with the app and try the various activities. The app is gender neutral and allows you to pick your favorite Bluebee Pal to play along OR choose your own Bluebee Pal.

Bluebee Pals
by Kayle Concepts LLC

Price: $FREE

Bluebee Pals app is an interactive app which brings your Bluebee Pal to life! No Bluebee Pal is needed to use the app or you can use your own Bluebee Pal. The app features activities of daily living.

What we love…

bright interactive app that encourages children to learn a variety of words in English ranging from numbers, colors, shapes, and everyday words.

What we’d love to see…

use of matching numbers to roman numerals for the counting, no timer for some of the games, shorter “test” at the end of the app

Summary

Fun interactive kids app that teaches children numbers and a variety of words in a interactive birthday adventure for Yaya. There is no IAP or advertising.

Our Rating

Yaya Learns English by Kiddies City is a iPad only app in which a young girl named Yaya explores the city in a variety of interactive scenes. Each scene has a variety of activities from finding coins and matching them up by numbers in the train scene, to earning tickets at a theme park and attending a birthday party! The app uses U.K. English, but many words are similar to American English and it is great for kids of all ages. The app features English, German, Spanish, Korean, or Chinese as languages. There are four apps in the series including Yaya learns German, Yaya learns Spanish, Yaya learns Chinese all of which have a similar story just with different languages tied to them. The app features multi step directions, completing a task, finding coins and matching them up, getting the birthday ready and more.

My son loves anything to do with trains – so he really enjoyed putting together the tracks and matching the first letter of the objects (“r” for rainbow and “t” for tree). He really enjoyed trying to make the tracks correct so he could continue within the app. At the birthday party, it was fun for my son to help Yaya decorate by making juice – he chose orange and loved watching the blender make it. He also enjoyed matching the letters to the words and getting stars for finishing each task. The app has beautiful artwork with animations throughout including floating balloons. As a mom, I also liked my kids could touch the speaker icon to hear the word spoken again. The app features numbers from one to ten and thirty seven other words like apple, roller coaster, bridge, house and other words you use everyday in the English language. The narration in the app is well done by a native English speaker. I would suggest this app for kids aged four through about second grade because of the complexity for some of the mini games. I liked that the app had a comprehension test at the end – although 30 questions seemed a bit high – I would prefer if there were ten or so questions that rotated through. My older son especially enjoyed the birthday room and making the cake, blowing up the balloons and sorting the candy items for the favor jars. The app features a gated parental area which includes a glossary of the words including pronunciation, links to social media. This parental area is accessed by touching a number and holding it for three seconds.

In terms of improvements, seeing a number on a coin versus the roman numeral can be confusing for kids who may not have learned that concept yet. I have a 3 year old who loved finding the coins, but had a hard time matching them to the roman numeral because they were not the same. When you successfully complete the numbers, you are presented with a screen which shows the coins – again with numbers and the spelling of the number which is different than how it is presented within the app. Older kids may understand the concept more clearly and be able to execute There are also a number of items within the various screens it would be nice to see an interaction with when you touch them. In the park, my son got frustrated because when you put the kids on the rides you are timed as you answer questions – it would be nice for younger kids if you didn’t have a timer because when time ends you have to start the level again. I would also like to be able to mute the background music – as it can be a bit distracting but when you turn down the sound you lose the narration.

Overall, this is a cute app designed to help kids learn English in a fun and interactive way. It is designed for children who already speak English as well as non native English speakers. The mini games are fun and have good replay opportunities – but younger kids especially can get frustrated when you try the app because of the inconsistencies in the levels of the games. There are no in-app purchases and no advertising contained within the app. This is a fun educational app that will have kids playing over and over again.

by Category:Requirements: Compatible with
Size: 0 MB

$

NOTE: A fee was received to expedite this review to the top of our waiting list but this payment has not influenced the objectivity of the review and all opinions have been offered honestly.

Read with Phonzy by MeowTek is a free universal app for iOS which features speech recognition to understand how well kids pronounced words using a character named Phonzy who provides prompts on the words. The app requires that you opt in via email to use it and understand the terms and conditions. It utilizes speech technology which recognizes and assesses the specific word that you are focusing on in the sentence. It works best with children and does work well in a noisy environment like a busy home or a place where there is background noise. As children pronounce words correctly, they can unlock the word which is then put into a gallery. It also helps kids build confidence in reading (especially sight words) and improves skills of sentence building and thinking quickly. We tested the app in a variety of environments including with a television on in the background, at a local park and in a classroom with other children. Each time Phonzy was able to zero in and understand the words being spoken without picking up the ambient noise.

One of the great things for me about the app was that I could help my son focus in on specific word types which he would learn and then as he got better with the pronunciation we were able to go back and re-listen to where he might have previously stumbled. The app helps you correctly pronounce words and encourages children to read out loud – without a lot of corrections “in the moment” which then helps to build self confidence and sounding out skills. MeowTek collects the audio recordings to improve the speech technology of the app and increase recognition, but no personal information about your child is collected. Phonzy currently focuses on key words and important phrases, with the end goal of understanding the entire sentence. The app is PRIVIO certified which means that MeoTek has COPPA compliant privacy practices to protect your child’s information and the verification via email is the method of ensuring that a parent understands that their child is using the app.

To use the app, Phonzy presents the user with a simple sentence similar to the one above with one specific word highlighted. Your child reads and records the sentence and if the highlighted word is pronounced correctly, you get the object which is then placed in your gallery. The words presented are appropriate for children from late kindergarten through mid-elementary school or approximately end of grade 3 according to the ones that I saw. My son gained huge amounts of confidence when reading with Phonzy aloud because I wasn’t always trying to correct him and he didn’t feel “pressured” to perform on the spot. My son liked that Phonzy would recognize his words most of the time and that he could easily re-record them as needed.

Phonzy is currently working to understand additional speech and speech recognition technology. Currently, Phonzy is programmed to understand the specific highlighted words, very occasionally he will misunderstand a user however, as my son used the app more we found that Phonzy was correct in 18/20 trials. The data collected from the app is made anonymous and is used to build and improve on speech recognition technology, it is never shared with any third parties and neither are the actual recordings. I also loved that I could save the sentences that my son was saying and share them with his speech therapist to show his progress over time.

Overall, this is a great free app that encourages children to increase the number of words that they can read and earn some fun gallery prizes doing so. It was a great self confidence booster for my son who struggled at times reading out loud and now has built up some confidence as he works through using the app and practicing new words. We also liked knowing that we were helping Meowtek improve their speech recognition technology and perhaps, learn from some of the challenges that my son was having.

What we love…

What we’d love to see…

ability to have a budget for toys, more options when designing your own toy

Summary

Remove this text and add your own here.

Our Rating

Grandpa’s Toy Shop by Fairlady Media is a universal app for iOS featuring Grandpa and a variety of great activities including design and building of toys, pricing of toys, helping customers choose a toy, using the cash register to calculate totals as well as cleaning up after they have closed for the night. Skills practiced include math (1 – 20), reading (spell the names of ten different toys including robot and boat), creative design of toys, selecting different parts to make a robot, using the cash register to add up the total and pricing the toys.

This app from Fairlady Media reminds me of going to the toy store with my son. There are so many choices of things that he can choose. My son loved making toys including robots by choosing arms, legs, body and head, decorating items using jewels, spelling of a variety of toys, helping the customer choose items, and adding up the total of the items purchased. I loved the life skills of choice, finding objects on a list and pricing them as well as adding up the total.

I loved how many choices were available to design the toys. My older son loved designing a kite, making a colorful teddy bear while my younger son scribbled and made the jewels to the crown. I also liked that the activities were step by step including the building of the doll (head, body, arms, legs) and similarly the robot was built the same way. After you created the design and toys they would go to the toy shop to be displayed – something my artistic 8 year old loved! I also liked that I could customize which games were appropriate depending on the child so I could turn them on and off as well as the music. My son also liked to see his creations displayed. I also liked seeing how my son would look at the prices of the items as he tried to figure out the cost for each of the specific items. In addition, I liked how there was a specific pattern – first you make toys, then you “open” the shop by making a sign advertising one of the toys you made, spinning the pinwheels and putting out the sign. Next you price the toys before the customer looks for specific toys – which helped kids pick which ones they needed from a field of eight. It’s also nice that the toys rotate making it fun for kids to play over and over.

In terms of enhancements, it might be fun if you were given a budget and then the child could figure out which combination of items you could buy for x amount versus using the shopping list. My son also wished that there were more choices for coloring in the designed toys like the sailboat or that he could choose the width of the crayon. For those that are not yet good at math, it might be nice if the cash register had an icon to represent the specific toy by touch instead of adding them together. Currently the cash register does have some icons but they don’t represent toys that I saw on the shelf on a routine basis.

Overall, this is a fun app designed for preschool age up. I liked that you could pick games which catered to your child’s strengths which meant that more or less mini games were available depending on your child’s skill level. There are no external links or in-app purchases. There is advertising for other Fairlady Media apps but it has a parental gate of a birth year in order to proceed.

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Meet the iMums

The iMums - Amanda, Alison, Mary and Grace - are four mothers from different parts of the world dedicated to informing parents about the best digital stories, educational apps, fun games and technology products available for their children. We also offer the latest news in apps for kids, interesting articles, developer interviews, free apps and regular giveaways! Read more.

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